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[rythyme]

Gender & Boys Love: Who Watches BL Dramas in Thailand?

ok i just watched THE MOST FASCINATING LECTURE on the history and transformation of BL in Asia, a+ would recommend checking it out if you’re interested. there were tons of amazing points about queerness and gender and transformative works that i want to shout about but i am not super articulate at the moment and i don’t have the time so! i’m gonna talk about some demographic information that was shared instead!!

(The above was included in a presentation by Dr. Tom Baudinette, a BL acafan. check him out on twitter, he’s super cool!)

what’s interesting to me here is that yes, as has been historically the stereotypical narrative for BL as a genre, the majority of BL viewers in Thailand are women — but a very significant minority are men! this is also something a lot of us knew anecdotally but it’s really cool to have concrete numbers. surprise! a lot of men, particularly queer men, really like bl dramas! in fact, there might be a higher percentage of men watching BL dramas than men reading fic on AO3!

let me talk about that last bit more. as some of you may or may not know, i myself am a bit of an acafan and have published some data science research about learning and comment culture in fanfiction communities. five years ago (oh god, was it really that long??) i did a fanfiction community survey that included a few basic demographic questions. here’s the gender distribution from that survey:

Only 4% of the people who responded to the survey were men. That’s... not a lot.

A couple disclaimers: this survey is 5 years old, and just from my anecdotal experiences I think the percentage of nonbinary and genderqueer users has probably increased since then. the transgederification beam really cracked a lot of eggs during the pandemic (myself included).

Also, over 88% of the survey takers used both AO3 *and* tumblr, so this isn’t necessarily a perfect snapshot of all of AO3 so much as the AO3-and-tumblr crowd. When you look at a survey done in 2018 on Reddit, they found that 63% of the survey takers were female and 29% were male, with 8% responding with various other gender options. The AO3-and-Reddit crowd is, understandably, gonna be a little different, but I suspect the AO3-and-tumblr crowd miiiiight’ve outnumbered them in 2017. Who knows.

Aside from the reddit one, pretty much every other survey done on AO3 that I’ve seen puts the percentage of men somewhere between 3% and 7%. If you’re one of those men, hello!! Who knows how many of you there truly are, but I suspect there are probably fewer than the 21% Nielsen Media Group found in Thailand’s BL drama viewership.

now, i know this is kind of comparing apples to oranges, since there’s a lot of differences between the bl community in thailand and the AO3 community. sure, they’re both largely centered around romantic content about men loving men, but there are a lot of cultural differences and nuances et cetera. ALSO, to be clear, i am not saying that having more queer men in a community makes it more or less “acceptable” to create content about queer men. i just think this comparison is interesting because it forces us to reconsider some preconceptions or biases about what kinds of people produce and consume BL or M/M content, and why.

There is a LOT of nuance in this topic that I don’t have time for — if you’re interested, go watch that lecture I linked above. In general, I would just caution people to think critically about the preconceptions we might have about BL fans in east and southeast Asia and avoid moralizing about BL without taking into account the nuanced history of the genre within Asian queer communities. 😊

thanks for reading! theo out 🎤